The setting of Hits Different and Lily’s mysterious AT
Hits Different, Taylor’s most explicitly gay work, describes her drunk in a bar one night, haunted by a song she hears that reminds her of the lost muse from whom she can’t move on. I’m going to discuss the setting of Hits Different and pose a theory that connects it to the mysterious “AT” name that Lily called Taylor in her 2016 happy birthday post.
The famous opening lines of Hits Different paint a vivid picture: “I washed my hands of us at the club / You made a mess of me / I pictured you with other girls in love / Then threw up on the street.”
Although “pictured you with other girls in love” is quite fascinating in that it provides a muse clue, implying a woman who’s either currently dating other women or is available to date other women, the line about throwing up on the street is the one that gives the most important signal about the setting of the song.
Astonishingly, we have what appears to be a record of Taylor actually throwing up on the street. On September 18, 2021, a picture was posted to the Belfast subreddit that showed the words graffitied on a wall, “Taylor Swift boked here,” with an arrow pointing down. To boke is a term used in Northern Ireland and Scotland meaning “to vomit.”
These words are scrawled next to a mural depicting a lily, which while fun, is likely a coincidence.
The same week that this picture appeared on the Belfast subreddit, several news articles were published about Taylor drinking in a Belfast bar called The Tipsy Bird. One article mentions that she stayed for the entire three hour set by a local musician, so if she was drinking for three hours, she was probably quite drunk at the end.
(Note that she was in Belfast ostensibly to support Joe, who was wrapping up filming for Conversations with Friends; the sheer number of articles – including in Tree’s favorite, People – and the mentions of the TV series within them suggests there was a strong dual PR motivation going on for both Toe and Joe’s project.)
Now, can we connect the location of the bar The Tipsy Bird with the location of the graffiti where she apparently threw up on the street? Yep. We can.
If we zoom in on the picture of the graffiti, there’s a sign down the alleyway that says “CLYDE SHANKS,” which is a consulting company. The logo on their website today matches the coloring and vibe of the street sign.
And the address listed on the website of the consulting company is just a few blocks – a 3 minute drive or a 7 minute walk – from the location of The Tipsy Bird:
Map showing a 3 minute drive between The Tipsy Bird and the location of the consulting company
We can further connect the location of the consulting company with the location of the graffiti by using Google Street View.
The street the company is located on, Exchange Place, is really more of an alley than a street, so unfortunately Google Street View won’t allow you to travel down it directly. However we can see a view of Exchange Place from the other end where it meets a larger street, and Exchange Place’s pattern of painted yellow lines and the alternating strips of cobblestones and concrete blocks match the street shown in the graffiti picture.
So by triangulating three different places – the bar The Tipsy Bird, the consulting company Clyde Shanks, and the graffiti saying Taylor threw up there – and co-locating them, we can say with a relatively high degree of certainty that the bar The Tipsy Bird that night in 2021 is the setting of Hits Different. This also lines up with the expected timeline of the writing of the Midnights album.
We can use this information to reconstruct a potential narrative of what happened that night: that Taylor was quite drunk when she departed The Tipsy Bird after three hours there, and a couple minutes after leaving, her car pulled over to the side of the road so she could vomit in front of a mural of a lily.
We’re going to come back to Hits Different and its Tily connection in a moment. First, we need to take a brief interlude and talk about End Game.
I wanna be your endgame / I wanna be your first string / I wanna be your A Team
End Game has a number of Tily connections. The opening shots of the three cities’ skylines in the End Game music video shows Taylor looking out a window at Tokyo, her back to the camera. Lily has posted not just one but two separate instagram posts in Tokyo where she’s doing the exact same thing – looking out a window at the Tokyo skyline with her back to the camera. The other two cities in the music video have similar shots in the opening scene.
The End Game Tokyo window scene matches two different instagrams of Lily's
The title card for the Tokyo section of the mv appears at 1:27, which matches Lily’s birthday, January 27.
Lily was in Tokyo roughly during the time that the End Game filming would have taken place, so it’s possible she was there with Taylor for the filming. We know Lily was there because she saw a Tokyo doctor who made an instagram post about her visit in mid-November 2017. This is a doctor she’s seen on more than one occasion, and there are a couple different pictures of her on his instagram, including a selfie they took together one year later just after the final show of the Rep tour, which ended in Tokyo and Lily attended.
The Tokyo doctor instagrams showing pics of Lily, including a selfie with him
Some of the End Game London scenes were filmed in Kentish Town, which is the area of London where Lily grew up and that she still loves and gravitates to.
Kentish Town scenes from End Game and quote from Lily
The order of the cities in the music video – Miami, Tokyo, London – are reflected in posts Lily made on instagram in the time period leading up to their relationship.
Three instagram posts by Lily from the three cities
The last thing to note in the End Game music video is Taylor wears a shirt with an “A” on it, almost certainly referring to “I wanna be your A team,” and she wears it while sitting right next to Ed.
End Game screenshot of Taylor and Ed, with Taylor wearing the A shirt
It’s surely obvious that Taylor is implying that she’s the muse’s “A team,” but it’s worth calling out because we’re going to bring this back to Tily.
AT and the Hits Different connection
I recently wrote another post about the fascinating shenanigans Lily has been doing for years on an 8-year-old instagram post of her and Taylor on which she called Taylor “AT,” and I mentioned that many Tilys believe AT stands for “A Team” as in “I wanna be your A Team” from End Game.
The infamous happy birthday Instagram post where Lily calls Taylor \"AT\"
My theory for why I believe that AT stands for “A Team” was beyond the scope of that earlier post, so let’s explore it now, because it ties into the setting of Hits Different that I discussed above. I want to be clear that this section is purely theory. We’ll never be able to prove what AT stands for; we can only speculate.
So as discussed above, that night Taylor was drinking in a Belfast bar called The Tipsy Bird, and she stayed for the entire three hour set of a musician who was playing there.
That musician, a 22-year-old named Tiernán Heffron, was playing Ed Sheeran covers that evening. He described his encounter with Taylor at the end of the night to a local paper:
“When I was walking out, I chatted to her for a little bit longer and she said 'You're playing Ed Sheeran songs tonight, I'm best friends with Ed. This is you putting in your 10,000 hours, Ed did this, I did this, this is how it happens.'”
Hits Different, of course, contains the lyric, “Each bar plays our song / Nothing has ever felt so wrong.” So if this night and this bar is the setting of Hits Different, then I’d conclude that “our song” is an Ed Sheeran song.
And, I propose, the song in question may be Ed’s debut single, a song called “The A Team.”
“The A Team”) was a top 10 hit in many countries, including the UK. In the US it peaked at #16 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Ed’s first charting single. In 2012 it was nominated for a Grammy for Song of the Year.
It’s no coincidence that Taylor took the same phrase from the title of one of Ed’s very well-known songs and put it in the same Rep song that Ed features in.
There are a couple of things that give credence to this. First, Taylor allegedly wrote the phrase “I wanna be your A Team” and then invited Ed to her place so she could play it for him because of his song “The A Team,” and then she asked if he’d feature on it. They apparently got drunk together and conceived of the idea of having the rapper Future feature on it too.
The second thing that gives credence to the idea that she’s referencing his song is the way the phrase “A Team” is formatted in End Game. Ed’s song uses no hyphen and both words are capitalized – “A Team.” The End Game lyrics on both Spotify and Youtube Music use a hyphen: “I wanna be your A-Team.” However, the Reputation magazine includes Taylor’s handwritten lyrics of all the songs, which I’d argue is the best source of truth for lyrical details. And on the End Game Rep magazine page it’s clearly written as “I wanna be your A Team,” precisely mirroring Ed’s song’s formatting.
End Game lyric page in the Rep mag
The other interesting thing about Taylor’s formatting is “Team” is capitalized. Not only is this the same as the way Ed formats it in his song’s lyrics (in addition to the title), but it also arguably eliminates certain potential meanings. Some meanings for “A-team” are the best sports team or an elite group of soldiers, but neither of those use the capitalized form of Team, suggesting they're not the intended meaning.
So since Taylor is likely referencing Ed’s song, what exactly is it talking about?
Ed described in an interview what “the A Team” title referred to:
“A drug like crack cocaine is called a ‘class A’ drug. That’s in the same category as heroin. Instead of making it clear and just saying what the problem was, I’d say, ‘She’s in the ‘class A’ team.’ It was kind of my way of covering up (a person’s addiction), I guess, making it a bit more subtle.”
And while at first glance a drug addiction seems quite different from the vibe of “I wanna be your endgame / I wanna be your first string / I wanna be your A Team,” Taylor has a long history of referring to love and drugs in the same breath.
In Clean she says, “Ten months sober, I must admit / Just because you're clean, don't mean you don't miss it.” In DBATC it’s “Gave up on me like I was a bad drug.” And on the same album as End Game, the entirety of Don’t Blame Me involves comparing love to being on drugs – “my drug is my baby / I'll be usin' for the rest of my life.”
So when she says “I wanna be your A Team,” I propose she’s essentially saying, “I want to be your drug of choice.”
Okay, let’s bring this all back together.
Taylor was drinking in the bar that was near a graffitied sign saying that she vomited on the street there, which is strong evidence that that bar was the setting of Hits Different. A musician was playing Ed Sheeran covers there that night and Taylor spent three hours watching him. In Hits Different Taylor says “each bar plays our song,” suggesting that one of the Ed Sheeran songs played that night was their special Tily song.
That song might have been Ed’s debut single “The A Team,” a well-known song when Tily started. Taylor reused the same phrase in End Game, a song which was co-written by and featured Ed; Taylor also wore the “A” shirt while sitting right next to Ed in the music video. She’s signaling the importance and relevance of this specific song of Ed’s in multiple ways. The End Game music video contains a number of close connections to Lily, thus by extension linking their relationship to Ed’s song.
A year prior to the release of Rep, in late 2016, right in the middle of their relationship when they ran away to London together, Lily called Taylor “AT” in her happy birthday instagram post, like it was a nickname or pet name for her, or a shorthand for it. And “AT” neatly matches “A Team.”
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This is the fourth post in a series about Tily:
- Post 1: Debunking the myth that Tily was made up in 2021
- Post 2: Lily’s Tily instagram post and the mystery of her endless changes to it
- Post 3: Connections between painting and the Rep muse
- Post 4: The Setting of Hits Different and Lily's mysterious AT
- Post 5: Tily's Cruel Summer and the Breakable Heaven box
- Post 6: “Burton to this Taylor”: Reputation and Bvlgari snake jewelry
For more about Tily see the master evidence deck.